This disclosure generally relates to online systems, and more specifically to creating a federated list of identifiers associated with a user of an online system.
With the increasing number of available online systems, such as social networking systems, users may be individually registered across a wide number of online systems. Each time the user registers with an online system, the user has a new user profile that may be unique to that particular online system. Users may use each online system for different purposes. For example, a user may primarily utilize a first online system as a social online network and primarily utilize a second online system as a professional online network. Thus, users may choose to provide different information in their user profile on each respective online system.
Online systems often utilize the information provided by a user in the user profile for a variety of purposes. For example, online networks may desire to deliver content items that are tailored for a user based on the user's interests and/or characteristics that are listed in the user's profile. However, given that a user may only choose to provide a portion of his/her characteristics or interests to any one online system, each online system may not have a full understanding of the user. This leads to inefficiencies, especially in the context of content delivery where the lack of a comprehensive profile of the user may lead to the delivery of content that is poorly tailored to the user.